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CHILDREN’S ORAL POETRY: IDENTITY AND OBSCENITY1

C.W. SULLIVAN III

I offered this paper for publication not so much for any original insights present 
but as it may be (or may not be!) an example of how to take children’s folklore 
scholarship into other venues—in this case, children’s literature, at a conference 
where this was the only children’s folklore paper.

Introduction

We were all children once, and according to children’s folklorist Jay Mechling, 
that might pose a problem for collectors of children’s folklore. In an essay entitled 
“Children’s Folklore,” in Elliott Oring’s collection, Folk Groups and Folklore Genres, 
Mechling begins his argument by saying, “The white, male folklorist recognizes 
that he will never really know what it means to be a black woman, but we all 
think we know what it means to be a child” (1986, 91). But our knowledge of 
what it means to be a child is filtered through a lens that is thick with the years 
that have passed since we were children, years during which we have forgotten or 
glossed over much, years during which selective memory has compressed some 
experiences and expanded others, years during which we have developed our 
own “presumptions and emotional responses” to the very subject that we think we 
are treating objectively (91).

In fact, some adults, when confronted with certain materials collected by 
children’s folklorists, deny the reality of those materials or, worse, accuse 
folklorists of unethical behavior. I, as editor of Children’s Folklore Review, was 
accused of providing children with obscene materials when I published a series of 
articles by sociologist Gary Alan Fine on pre-adolescent male slang. My accuser, a 
local high school principal, neither recognized that the publication was for adults, 
not children, nor remembered that children of that age, especially perhaps boys, 
were capable of such language. Thanks to an understanding department chair 
and dean who defended me and the journal, I suffered no professional ill effects 
from the situation and CFR has continued on as a successful and, I hope, a well-
repescted journal of children’s folklore research.

Other scholars have not been so fortunate. An Australian collector 
photographing girls’ playground games took a picture of girls flipping up their 
dresses and showing their undergarments as such an action was described in the 
rhyme they were chanting:

Flintstones, Flintstones, yabba, yabba, doo! 
(repeat) 
Fred does the bow, 
Wilma does the curtsy, 
Pebbles shows her Knickers, 
And we all go “Wow!”

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His dissemination of these photographs caused him to be arrested and suspended 
from his university position for distributing child pornography. The case dragged 
on for six months or so until it came before an understanding magistrate who 
threw it out of court (Australian Children’s Folklore Newsletter 1994, 1). Neither of 
these cases is about the children, but both illustrate adults’ misperceptions about 
childhood, adults projections of their own attitudes onto what they see happening 
on the baseball field or the playground.

These projections arise for at least two reasons. One one hand, as Mechling 
recounts, our imagination is still dominated by “[e]nlightenment and romantic 
era portraits of the child,” by our “American commonsense understanding of 
childhood…[as] a period of separation, protection, preparation, and innocence,” 
and by the “various schools of child psychology” that are all “bound by cultural 
assumptions and biases” (93). On the other hand, it seems to me that the American 
(if not western) process of “growing up” encourages us to leave childhood behind. 
How often are children told “Act your age,” “Don’t be a baby,” and “You’re too 
old for that”? Children are told, with regard to rivalry with younger siblings, “You 
should know better; you’re older.” Some growing up, “Act like a lady” and “Big 
boys don’t cry,” is gender coded. This attitude is nothing new, as an often-quoted, 
ancient passage indicates: “When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as 
a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things” 
(1 Corinthians 13:11).

The solution, Mechling argues, is for the folklorist to “approach the child’s folk 
group assuming very little” (93). One of the definitions of a folk group is that it 
operates on a very “high context” level; that is, things happen in the group that 
outsiders would not understand without explanation. This is especially true of 
folk speech; within a folk group there are words and phrases that members of 
the group will share with each other and understand that outsiders would need 
explained—if, in fact, members of the group were willing to share such words and 
phrases with outsiders. Mechling continues his argument by suggesting a solution: 
“the folklorist [should take] an approach that views children’s folk cultures as if 
they were fully complex, developed, and autonomous. This ‘as if’ assumption 
means that we approach children’s folk cultures just as we would any unfamiliar 
culture” (93).

To rephrase Mechling, then, one might say, “The adult folklorist recognizes 
that he or she no longer really knows what it means to be a child and approaches 
the collection of children’s folklore as one would apporoach the collecting of 
folklore from any group of which he or she is not a member.” What I would like 
to present here, then, is a look a children’s oral poetry as the creation of a culture 
significantly different from the adult culture around it and examine the ways in 
which the members of this culture use poetic forms to create, first, an identity 
separate from the adult culture and, second, especially through the medium of 
obscenity, an identity in opposition to the adult culture.

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Identity

Much of what I wish to say about identity in general has been said before, but 
I hope to be able to add something to the discussion. In American Children’s 
Folklore, Simon Bronner asserts that the division between adult authority and 
the children under adult control is reflected in children’s folklore in general: “For 
children, we must remember, do not simply ape the mores of adults. They want 
to declare their own identity, and lore is their protected expression of cultural 
connection to one another” (1988, 29).2 Bronner continues, “Besides rebelling 
against adult norms, children’s folklore reflects children’s concerns about their 
rapid growth, the appropriate responses to adult society, and traditional roles and 
values in a nation being modernized” (31). Oral poetry, whether handed down 
traditionally to deal with recurring situations or created and circulated in response 
to contemporary cultural stimuli, forms a very large part of younger children’s 
folklore.

Children use traditional rhymnes in what Iona and Peter Opie, in The Lore and 
Language of Schoolchildren, call “oral legislation” (1959, 121-153); that is, they 
use rhymes in the way older children and adults use books of rules. Counting-
out rhymes, for example, such as “Eenie, meenie, miney, moe” or “One potato, 
two potato,” are considered unbiased ways of selecting the first “IT” in a game, 
the sacrificial person who has to be “IT” without having been caught.3 Game or 
play rhymes are not always legislation, but they do structure children’s activities; 
examples include game rhyme “The Farmer in the Dell,” hand-clapping rhyme “I’m 
a pretty little Dutch girl,” ball-bouncing rhyme “My name is Alice,” and the largest 
category of all, jump-rope rhymes “Cinderella Dressed in Yellow,” “Teddy Bear, 
Teddy Bear, turn around,” and “Policeman, Policeman do your duty.” Such rhymes 
have been circulated by children for generations as they organized their own 
play, without direct adult supervision, long before they were whisked off to such 
regulated activities as adult-organized football or baseball leagues, Boy Scouts, or 
Girl Guides.

In addition to regulating their own games, children have a series of rhymes that 
attempt to enforce conformity. Children have their own ideas, independent of (but 
to some extent derived from) the adult culture that surrounds them, and they have 
rhymes which make fun of or insult transgressors within the group. Overweight 
children hear “Fatty, fatty, two-by-four,” a child hastily dressed might hear, “I see 
London, I see France / I see [name]’s underpants,” informers to authorities hear, 
“Tattletale, tattletale, / Hanging on the bull’s tale,” liars hear “Liar, liar, pants on 
fire,” and, of course, immature or sensitive children hear, “Cry, baby cry, stick your 
finger in your eye.” There are many more such rhymes, and the point is that they 
are circulated by children, not taught by adults, and address what the child’s folk 
group considers proper or, more to the point, improper behavior.

On a slightly more complex level, and more obviously influenced by the adult 
community, perhaps especially by the family, are rhymes that insult people outside 
the child’s immediate peer and age group. The Opies, collecting in the 1950s, 
included the following rhymes in a chapter entitled “Partisanship.” Some rhymes 
have historical origins:

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The Irishmen ran down the hill, 
The Englishmen ran after, 
And many a Pat got a bullet in his back 
At the Battle of Boy’an Water. (1959, 343).

Other kinds of partisanship can be directly religious. Protestants may say, 
“Catholic, Catholic, ring the bell, / When you die you’ll go to hell” and be 
answered by the Catholics, “Protestant, Protestant, quack, quack, quack, / Go to 
the Devil and never come back” (344). Still other rhymes can be political, this one 
based on an Oscar Meyer bologna commercial jingle:

My peanut has a first name 
It’s J-I-M-M-Y 
My peanut has a second name 
It’s C-A-R-T-R [sic] 
Oh, I hate to see him every day 
And if you ask me why I’ll say 
’Cause Jimmy Carter has a way 
Of messing up the U-S-A (Sullivan 1980, 9).

What are serious matters to adults—war, religion, and politics—become fodder for 
children creating parodies of that adult seriousness.

There are also national and ethnic attitudes in some children’s rhymes. When 
I was young, we caught “a Nigger by the toe,” although later and more sensitive 
versions of “Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe” change “Nigger” to “tiger.” In One 
Potato, Two Potato: The Folklore of American Children, Herbert and Mary Knapp, 
collecting collecting and publishing some twenty years after the Opies,4 include, 
in addition to political rhymes, what I would call derisive rhymes about African-
Americans, Asian-Americans, Jews, and “Polacks”5 (1976, 190-206). One that the 
Knapps collected covers several bases:

Franklin said to Eleanor, 
“Eleanor, how are you?” 
Eleanor said to Franklin, 
“I’ve got some advice for you. 
Roses are red, violets are blue, 
You kiss the niggers, 
I’ll kiss the Jews, 
And we’ll stay in the White House 
As long as we choose.” (1976, 201).

Rather than reinforcing internal conformity, these rhymes solidify the folk 
group’s identity in opposition to what anthropologists and sociologists, as well 
as folklorists, would call “The Other”; i.e., those people who are obviously and 
demonstrably not “Us.”

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Another way in which children assert their own identity is through parody. 
This seems to me a more subtle kind of partisanship or derision in which children 
take what is presented to them by the adult culture and parody it; that is, they 
take something serious and change it to make it humorous. Bronner suggests 
that “Children are fond of parodying the standard and familiar, especially when 
in the process of doing so they can establish that they have a world of their own 
making” (1988, 77). Nothing is out of bounds as far as children are concerned. 
They will parody religious materials from evening-meal grace, “Good bread, good 
meat, / Good God, let’s eat” to evening prayers, “Now I lay me down to sleep, 
/ A bag of peanuts at my feet,” to Christmas carols, “Joy to the world, the school 
burned down.” School is a particular target; “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” 
becomes “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school” and in a 
parody of “On Top of Old Smokey,” we hear “I shot my poor teacher / With a 
forty-four gun.” Commerical jingles, too, are prime targets: “MacDonald’s is your 
kind of place, / They throw french fries in your face,” “Pepsi Cola hits the spot, / 
Smells like vinegar, tastes like snot,” or “Sani-Flush, Sani-Flush, / Cleans your teeth 
without a brush.” And there are many more parodies of this sort.

While most parodies serve to establish children’s identity as separate from the 
adult world, some parodies indicate different levels within children’s folk culture.6 
By parodying the theme song from the television show, Barney and Friends, older 
children can indicate that they have outgrown a program directed at the very 
young viewer. In “‘I Hate You, You Hate Me’; Children’s Responses to Barney the 
Dinosaur,” Elizabeth Tucker, while also acknowledging timely references to topics 
like the AIDS epidemic, asserts this very point. The original theme song, which 
begins “I love you, you love me,” becomes in parody versions:

I hate you, you hate me. 
Let’s go out and kill Barney  
And a shot rang out and 
Barney hit the floor 
No more purple dinosaur (1999, 28).

And as Judy McKinty points out, there are similar songs about the Teletubbies set 
to the Barney tune:

I hate Po, Po hates me, 
We’re not a happy family, 
With a dagger in his back and a bullet in his head, 
Uh-oh Laa Laa, Dipsy’s dead (2000, 49).

The older child’s execution of Barney or one of the Teletubbies signals his or her 
rejection of that earlier stage of life and is part of the putting behind of childish 
things I spoke of earlier.

By far, the most popular area of parody is the nursery rhyme. Nursery rhymes 
are among the earliest rhymes to which children are exposed, the earliest rhymes 
they learn themselves, and the earliest rhymes they parody. Moreover, the 

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parodies show both the separation from the adult world and the development of 
the child within his or her folk group. The earliest of these, that is, those said by 
the youngest children, are usually innocent.

Mary had a little lamb, 
It was a greedy glutton, 
She fed it on ice cream all day, 
And now it’s frozen mutton (Opie 1959, 90).

And one of my favorites:

Mary had a little lamb, 
Her father shot it dead, 
Now Mary takes her lamb to school, 
Between two hunks of bread.

But as children get a bit older, the parodies become somewhat more daring:

Mary had a little lamb 
She tied it to a heater 
Every time it turned around 
It burned its little peter. (Bronner 1988, 80).

And then more sexually suggestive and linguistically complex:

Mary had a little lamb, 
And, boy, was the doctor surprised.

And:

Mary had a little lamb, 
She also had a bear; 
I’ve often seen her little lamb, 
But I’ve never seen her bear [bare].

What is true of the “Mary had a little lamb” parodies is also true of other nursery 
rhymes. Parodies tell what Jack burned when he jumped over the candle stick, 
what Jack and Jill were really doing up on that hill, what happened to Mother 
Hubbard when she went to get her dog a bone from the cupboard, how having 
so many children affected the Old Woman who lived in the shoe, and what Jack 
Horner was eating in the corner—just to name some of the most popular.

Obscenity7

This obviously brings us to the R-rated section of the performance. Children’s rude 
or off-color or obscene humor (let’s just settle on “obscene” as the cover term) 

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has been a problem for folklorists for some time. On one hand, as Iona Opie has 
testified (see note #4), publishers would not accept such materials in the 1950s. 
By the time of the Knapps’ One Potato, Two Potato in 1976, things had changed, 
and materials that could not have been published in the 1950s could be published. 
When Simon Bronner published American Children’s Folklore, in 1988, it seems 
as of anything was allowed. However, the Opies said, “Genuinely erotic verse…is 
unusual” (1959, 95), and the Knapps echoed that sentiment, “Little erotic verse 
shows up in grade school” (1976, 85); however, as the Knapps admitted on the 
very next page (86), it wasn’t easy, and was sometimes impossible, for adults to 
convince children to tell them such materials—and for obvious reasons.

As the Knapps suggest and Bronner’s examples reinforce, such erotic materials 
become plentiful among junior high school age children. As with the “Mary had 
a little lamb” parodies, children’s obscene humor is developmental within the 
folk group; that is, as the children get older, their obscene verse changes. The 
first subject of such verse is feces. One of the first insults a child learns is to call 
someone else a “doo doo head,” and there is an attendant verse, “Nanny, Nanny 
boo boo / Stick your head in doo doo.” The very first obscene verse I learned 
from an older boy in the neighborhood was:

1944 
The monkey climbed the door 
The door split 
The monkey shit 
1944

Why this made me laugh heartily, I now have no idea. A rhyme reported by the 
Knapps may illustrate its age with a reference to a chain-pull toilet, “Push the 
button, pull the chain, / Out comes a little black choo-choo train” (1976, 62). 
Bronner includes

The night was dark 
The sky was blue 
Down the alley 
A shit wagon flew 
A bump was hit 
A scream was heard 
A man was killed 
By a flying turd

and remarks that “These rhymes comment on children’s growing understanding of 
taboos on certain images and words” (1988, 81). They are also opportunities for 
children to engage in what Mechling might call “obscene play” or “forbidden play” 
(1986, 94), a kind of play which is their own and in which they engage in direct 
opposition to the attitudes of the adult folk group. And feces is just the beginning.

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In addition to feces, there is a general interest in all eliminatory and excretory 
functions. A rhyme in which the reciter points to the general areas of chest, crotch, 
and buttocks creates interesting food metaphors:

Milkly Milky, 
Lemonade, 
Around the corner, 
Hot dogs made.

As the title of Donna Lanclos’ article “Bare Bums and Wee Chimneys,” indicates, 
there is a great deal of children’s lore—rhymes, jokes, sayings, and songs—about 
those two areas of the body. In addition, underwear, which covers those body 
parts, is another topic of more than passing interest to children, and in addition to 
the “I see London, I see France” admonitory rhyme, there are others; and most of 
the rhymes in this category involve someone’s having lost his or her underwear. 
One such rhyme begins:

Tarzan, Tarzan, through the air 
Tarzan lost his underwear 
Tarzan say, “Me don’t care— 
Jane make me another pair” (Bronner 1988, 78).

In that rhyme and its many variations, Jane, Boy, and Cheetah are also naked. 
These rhymes about body parts and underwear, as well as the jokes and songs 
and sayings about them, allow children to engage in some forbidden language 
play, and because adults would find at least some of that language play 
objectionable, the children have, once again, delineated and taken possession of 
something that is not only their own but in opposition to adult norms.

From a focus on body parts and their excretory and eliminatory functions, it is 
probably not a huge step to focus on body parts and their reproductive functions. 
The information children have about sex and reproduction is often incomplete, 
hazy, and/or erroneous; but as soon as they are aware that babies come from 
women’s bodies, their lore begins to reflect this. The Knapps report the following 
recitation by a ten-year-old boy: “Now I lay her on the bed, / I pray to God I’ll use 
my head” (1976, 172), both a parody of “Now I lay me down to sleep” as well as 
a rather vague rhyme about sexual activity. More familiar, but no less vague, is a 
parody of “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean”:

My Bonnie lies over the ocean 
My Bonnie lies over the sea, 
My daddy lies over my mommy, 
And that’s how they got little me. (Knapp 1976, 185).

About a variation of the song, Bronner reports the person from whom the song 
was collected learned it in second or third grade; he comments, “Within the 
apparent innocence of this ditty, the singer is declaring her astute awareness 

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of sexual knowledge supposedly kept hidden from children” (1988, 218, n.22). 
Children’s questions about where babies come from show that they are, indeed, 
interested in the subject, and the rhymes, songs, jokes, and sayings indicate not 
only a sort of innocent knowledge, but also a willingness to know and share 
whatever information they have.

While it may be obvious that children know what they are talking about in the 
immediately previous examples of innocent sexual rhymes, it may be that they are 
saying more than they know in others. According to Roger Abrahams (1969, 31-
32), the single most popular jump-rope rhyme is:

Cinderella 
Dressed in yellow 
Went upstairs  
To kiss a fellow 
Made a mistake 
And kissed a snake 
How many doctors 
Did it take? 
1, 2, 3, 4, 5…(Bronner 1988, 70).

In a variant reported by the Knapps, Cinderella “Came downstairs with a 
bellyache” between “Kissed a snake” and “How many doctors did it take?” (1976, 
125). Mechling argues:

One way to account for the popularity of this rhyme is to see in 
it a disguised discussion of sex and pregnancy. The rhyme begins 
innocently enough with a fairytale character, probably known to 
children through the Disney film and storybooks. But the Cinderella 
story itself is about the sexual awakening of a young woman. In 
the jump-rope rhyme, the young woman goes upstairs to kiss her 
boyfriend, but she kisses a “snake” instead, and one way to interpret 
the meaning of “kissing a snake” is in sexual symbolic terms. In 
the child’s vague understanding of reproduction and the difference 
between the womb and the stomach, sexual contact could result in a 
“stomach ache”—that is, pregnancy (1986, 101).

The “bellyache” figures in numerous hand-clapping, jump-rope, and other game 
rhymes; and it is important to note that these are girls’ game rhymes, making the 
sexual interpretation even more convincing.8

Conclusions

Where does one draw the line? I do not mean with children; this is their material, 
and forbidding it to them would be as successful as King Canute’s fabled attempt 
to halt the incoming tide. I do not mean in this presentation, although I will admit 
a certain trepidation in presenting increasingly obscene materials (as well as some 

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I have already presented) to such an august gathering as this. No, I mean where 
do we draw the line between children’s and adolescents’ folklore?

Folklorists often talk about age-group folklore (Brunvand 1998, 54-56), and that 
almost works here, ending childhood at 12 and beginning adolescence at 13, but 
some children learn things sooner and others later. Perhaps it might be better to 
look at intent. I mentioned earlier the Opies’ and the Knapps’ comments that little 
erotic verse exists at the grade-school level. It does exist at the junior-high and 
high-school levels, where it is recited or told perhaps expressly for its erotic value 
(the basic knowledge of sex and sexuality being fairly well understood by the 
tellers at that age). 

In other words, the intent of the adolescent teller is different from the intent of 
the child teller. The adolescent teller intends to be erotic; the child teller, generally, 
does not. On the first level, “Identity,” the child tellers are creating and passing 
on verses that are their own, outside of and sometimes in opposition to what 
they hear from and see in the adult community; and it is difficult to tell just how 
important it is for those who are essentially powerless to have something of their 
own, something that they can control. On the second level, “Obscenity,” the child 
tellers are also asserting their independence from the adult culture, especially 
with the verses about bodily functions and the like; but they are also beginning to 
show an awareness of, in their own language, direct and metaphorical, that most 
secret of all adult knowledge, the knowledge of sexuality. But the child’s intent, 
whatever else it is, is not to be erotic.

We will read our children poems from A Child’s Garden of Verses, When We 
Were Very Young, and Now We are Six, and our children will love those books and 
poems, but when they are on their own, on the playground or in the woods, it is 
more likely that they will be reciting some of the materials, or variations thereof, 
mentioned above. And this is as it should be; they are entitled to their own poetry 
and to their identity as children as they express it in that poetry.

NOTES

1. A shorter version of this article was originally presented at the “Poetry and 
Childhood Conference and Exhibition” sponsored by Cambridge University and 
the British Library, London, 20-21 April 2009, and will be published in a volume of 
selected papers from the conference.

2. By “protected,” I assume that Bronner means that children protect their lore 
from adults, not that someone else is protecting the children.

3. Examples, unless otherwise noted, are from my own experiences or 
collections.

4. The publication date is important. Iona Opie has since said to me in private 
conversation that Oxford University Press would not publish some of the ruder 
materials that she and Peter collected.

5. Polack jokes, of course, are not really about Polish people but are actually 
an iteration of the Numbskull jokes that have circulated about various groups with 
ethnic and religious labels suitable to the time.

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6. See Donna M. Lanclos’ “Bare Bums and Wee Chimneys” for an extended 
discussion of defining lines between children and adults.

7. I am omitting the larger category of what Simon Bronner (1988, 81-82) calls 
gross rhymes, as violence and other subjects of gross rhymes are not generally 
considered “rude” or “obscene.”

8. Prior to the twentieth century, boys may have participated in what are now 
considered girls’ games. For a discussion of gender and hopscotch, see Derek Van 
Rheenan, “Boys Who Play Hopscotch: The Historical Divide of a Gendered Space” 
1998.

WORKS CITED

Australian Children’s Folklore Newsletter. 1994. 26 (August): 1-2.
Abrahams, Roger, ed. 1969. Jump Rope Rhymes: A Dictionary. Austin: University of 

Texas Press,
Bronner, Simon J. 1988. American Children’s Folklore. Little Rock: August House.
Brunvand, Jan H. 1998. The Study of American Folklore. 4th ed. New York: Norton.
Fine, Gary Alan. 1979-1981.Pre-Adolescent Male Slang, I-VII. Children’s Folklore 

Newsletter II.1, II.2, III.1, III.3, IV.1, IV.2, and IV.3 (Fall -Winter).
Knapp, Herbert, and Mary Knapp. 1976. One Potato, Two Potato: The Folklore of 

American Children. New York: Norton.
Lanclos, Donna M. 2000. Bare Bums and Wee Chimneys: Rudeness and Defining 

the Line Between Child and Adult. Children’s Folklore Review 22.2 (Spring): 
7-48.

McKinty, Judy. 2000. E-Contributions. Children’s Folklore Review 22.2: 49.
Mechling, Jay. 1986. Children’s Folklore.. In Folk Groups and Folklore Genres, ed. 

Elliott Oring. Logan: Utah State University Press, 91-120.
Opie, Peter, and Iona Opie. 1959. The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren. 

London: Oxford University Press.
Sullivan, C.W. III. 1980. Peanuts and Baloney. Center for Southern Folklore 3.1 

(Winter): 9.
Tucker, Elizabeth. 1999. “I Hate You, You Hate Me”: Children’s Responses to 

Barney the Dinosaur. Children’s Folklore Review 22.1 (Fall): 25-33.
Van Rheenan, Derek. 1998. Boys Who Play Hopscotch: The Historical Divide of a 

Gendered Space. Children’s Folklore Review 21.1 (Fall): 5-34.

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	CFR_2008-2009_Part22
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